What’s shaping UK professional services marketing in 2026?
Four themes dominated this year’s PM Forum Annual Conference and The Lawyer’s Marketing Leadership Summit: AI is reshaping how clients find and assess advisers; firms need reliable relationship data before AI can deliver; new BD enablement teams are driving CRM adoption among partners; and marketing must prove its commercial value in terms firm leadership recognises. The common thread: AI is only as useful as what your firm knows about its client relationships.
In two rooms full of senior UK professional services marketing and BD leaders this autumn, almost no one was asking what AI could do. They were asking why it isn’t working yet, and what has to change in their data, their teams, and their partners’ habits before it does.
We were fortunate to spend time at two of the sector’s standout events this season: the PM Forum Annual Conference, now in its 31st year, and The Lawyer’s Marketing Leadership Summit. Both brought together senior marketing and BD leaders for frank discussion of the problems firms are currently facing. Here are the four themes that stood out for professional services marketing in 2026, with the evidence behind them and what they could mean for your firm.
Table of contents
1. AI is rewriting the rules of digital visibility and client discovery
The thought leadership model most professional services firms rely on (publish insights, draw clients to the website, turn interest into conversations) doesn’t pull people in like it used to. At The Lawyer’s Marketing Leadership Summit, we heard early research showing a sharp fall in visits to law firm websites and published insights.
The wider data points the same way. When Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults, users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% of visits without one. Even the sources the AI cited barely benefited, with clicks on them in just 1% of visits. Pew also found that questions and longer search queries are more likely to produce AI summaries. That’s exactly how a General Counsel or finance director researching advisers tends to search.
Rather than publishing more, the room’s answer was to rethink what content is for. Posting a newsletter online is no longer enough on its own; each insight should be a reason to reach out to the clients who care about that issue, with a conversation tailored to them. That changes how you measure it, too: by the conversations an insight opens, not the page views it earns.
One of the more surprising points was about legal directories. You might expect AI to make them less relevant, but the opposite is happening. AI tools look for credible third-party sources, so directory rankings increasingly shape the answers they give. Take one example from the panel: a client asked an AI assistant to recommend a private client lawyer. The firm didn’t appear, because the tool was drawing on directory rankings. Directories are here to stay, the panel agreed, and AI can make submissions faster and lighter for legal marketing teams and partners.
For marketing teams, that makes answer engine optimisation (AEO) about much more than the website. Directory submissions and published insights now shape what AI tools say about your firm. Your partners’ client conversations do the work that page views used to.
2. From “artificial confidence” to true data readiness
PM Forum’s conference was built around confidence, and the most useful definition of it came at the end of the day. The closing keynote drew on decision neuroscience to describe confidence as the brain’s judgement of whether it has enough reliable evidence to act. It’s less about personality, and more about what you know.
That makes it a question of evidence, and the PM Forum and Meridian West benchmark suggests many firms are short of it. 84% of respondents say their board has set clear growth priorities, but only 44% think clients understand them. Just 11% say their firm does enough to listen to clients. Those are the gaps professional services marketing and BD teams are best placed to close. You bring the client’s voice into decisions made without the client in the room.
AI raises the stakes, and both events landed on the same risk. PM Forum’s AI panel warned that AI can make work look finished without making it correct. At the Marketing Leadership Summit, the point was even more direct: AI can make bad data worse, because it will confidently tell you whatever you ask it. With AI in the mix, there’s no longer any option of brushing bad data under the carpet. Unreliable data simply won’t surface when you need it. And data readiness isn’t just a legal sector problem: Gartner predicts that through 2026, organisations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data.
In our experience, relationship data is where the data readiness gap is widest. It’s the data professional services firms grow on, yet most of it lives in partners’ inboxes and calendars rather than the CRM. In our 2026 Partner Survey Report, which we commissioned Thinktiv to conduct with 120+ partners across legal, accounting, and other professional services firms, 78% said their current tools give them some relationship visibility that is hard to act on. And among those actively using AI for business development, 68% rely only on general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini. Those are tools that can’t see the firm’s relationships at all. That’s a bigger problem than it sounds. Data shows what’s been recorded. Relationship context shows who matters, why they matter, and what to do next. That’s what partners need before a client meeting, and it’s what AI tools need too if they’re going to give advice worth acting on.
What we see across the market, and what both events reinforced, is that the firms getting real value from AI do two things. They start with the decisions they need to make, such as which clients to invest in, where to cross-sell, and which relationships are at risk, and work back to the data those decisions need. And they stop relying on partners to type that data in. Leaders at the Summit described using AI to check and clean their data rather than trusting it for answers. The firms furthest ahead go a step further and capture relationship activity automatically from the systems partners already use, so that the foundation remains current without adding to anyone’s workload, while also providing critical context for people and AI tools alike.
3. Law firm BD enablement: building teams and tools partners actually use
Some of the most practical conversations about legal marketing and AI at the Summit were about people: who runs the technology, and whether fee earners actually use it. They turn out to be two sides of the same question.
Leaders described using vacancies to redesign roles rather than simply backfill them. That meant building BD enablement teams that bring together CRM, pitch tools, and BD training, and hiring people who pair systems knowledge with a real understanding of how the firm wins work. The redesigned roles attracted far more applicants than the old ones. In law firms, CRM is increasingly judged by the work it helps win, not the records it holds. That echoes PM Forum’s CMO panel, which described marketing and BD moving from support function to strategic partner, with client insight as the way into leadership conversations.
Those roles matter because technology only creates value if fee earners use it. The Summit panel was candid: if lawyers aren’t using a tool, it’s useless, and they rarely give one a second chance after a poor first experience.
What we see across the market lines up with what we heard. The firms getting CRM adoption right treat it as a change in behaviour, not a software rollout. They meet partners where they already work: their inbox, their calendar, and increasingly tools like Copilot. They show partners something useful first, before asking anything of them. And they turn what works into simple playbooks, so good practice spreads beyond a handful of enthusiasts. That’s exactly the work the new BD enablement roles are built to do.
4. Proving commercial value in a shifting market
Fee pressure is nothing new in UK professional services. The PM Forum and Meridian West benchmark found 69% of firms name fee pressure and margin erosion as a top brake on growth. But AI is adding a new twist. Clients can see that some work now takes less time, and at the Marketing Leadership Summit, leaders described clients pushing for faster turnarounds and adjusted fees as a result.
That puts more pressure on marketing and BD to show their value, and the Summit discussion was refreshingly honest about how hard that is. Partners who complete BD training sometimes expect instant revenue, so the advice was to position BD as building pipeline, not a magic wand. Leaders described tracking client touchpoints, engagement, client listening feedback, and repeat business alongside the bottom line. They also urged moving beyond deal tombstones and practice credentials, and building business cases in the language firm leadership uses: financial performance, partner profitability, risk, and operational efficiency.
Clients made the same point from their side. On a General Counsel panel, they were clear that technical expertise is now table stakes. What sets a firm apart is commercial understanding and advice framed around the client’s business, not just the law. Winning a place on a client panel doesn’t guarantee work either. Firms still need proactive, ongoing relationship-building, and individual lawyer reputations often carry more weight than the firm’s brand. PM Forum’s “Fight Club” debate, on whether confidence matters more than expertise, landed somewhere similar: confidence gets you in the room, but expertise keeps you there.
That’s why relationships matter so much commercially. Research by Harvard Law School’s Dr Heidi Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. That kind of collaboration depends on knowing who in your firm knows whom.
How Introhive powers the confident, AI-ready firm
Across both events, one idea kept coming back: your firm’s confidence, and the success of its AI strategy, rests on knowing your clients and who in your firm knows them best. Firms are starting to expect more from CRM than a tidy contact list. They want to see where relationships are strong, which ones have gone quiet, and where the next opportunity sits. Yet most of that knowledge still lives in partners’ inboxes, calendars, and heads.
Introhive makes that knowledge visible to the whole firm. It picks up who’s emailing and meeting whom, works out how strong each relationship is, and puts that in front of people where they already work: a short briefing before a meeting, your CRM, the browser, and AI tools like Copilot or Claude, giving them the relationship context they can’t get on their own.
- A partner heading into a client meeting can see which colleagues already know the people in the room.
- BD can see which key clients the firm hasn’t spoken to in months, and who’s best placed to pick up the phone.
- Ask Copilot about a client, and it can draw on the firm’s real relationships, not just its documents.
It’s why 20 of the world’s top 100 law firms and 36 of the top 100 accounting firms, including many here in the UK, trust Introhive’s relationship intelligence to help them grow their Relationship Capital.
Our thanks to PM Forum and The Lawyer for two excellent events, and to every speaker who shared their experience so openly.
Your relationships are your most valuable asset. If you’d like to see how to manage them like one, book a demo with our team.
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